An impressively synoptic treatment of a complex and important subject.
Sullivan provides a comprehensive overview and sharp critique of the ways in which innocent children are harmed by the criminal justice system.
The author, an associate professor of international studies and global affairs at St. Mary’s University, begins his remarkably thorough study by observing that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world; while this is pointed out often enough, the consequences of this fact for the children of those imprisoned and detained is a strangely neglected subject. Sullivan focuses on these “collateral consequences,” the many ways in which the blameless children of those arrested, detained, or deported suffer from a “vicarious punishment.” Several categories of these sanctions are explored, including the denial of citizenship to the children of non-citizens deported or detained, family separations imposed at the border that leave children without their parents, the “denationalization” of children of those accused of terrorist activity, and the separation of Indigenous children from families that were seen as resistant to full assimilation. The author prosecutes a persuasive case detailing the unacceptable imbalance between the needs of preventive justice and deterrence on the one hand and the rights of children on the other: “Preventive justice approaches prioritize risk management over individual civil liberties and the presumption of innocence.” He discusses the practice of meting out “stealth punishments disguised as administrative sanctions,” disingenuously strategic ways to legally impose harsh penalties upon those who have committed no crime. Sullivan also lucidly discusses technically prohibitive subjects such as competing theories of punishment, rendered in admirably accessible language. The author can advocate too unreservedly for rehabilitation, especially given its spotty empirical track record. And some may object to the idea that, in the case of detention for an immigration violation, job training and education should be provided to “help the detainee to grow as a human being,” as this assertion goes far beyond the respect of individual liberties. Still, this is a rigorously researched and argued assessment of the ways in which the criminal justice system unduly disadvantages children who have committed no offense.
An impressively synoptic treatment of a complex and important subject.Pub Date: May 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780197671238
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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